Goin' To Boston: A Song History

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"Goin' to Boston" is a play-party song, a singing game in which young people went through dance figures to their own voices rather than to a fiddle. In her notes to the song, Jean Ritchie recalled that when her mother was young, rural communities regarded dancing as sinful, so young people borrowed steps such as swings and sashays from the forbidden dances and worked them into games that used no instruments.[1] The song is catalogued as an Appalachian play-party line game, with figures that include a promenade, a sashay, a grand right-and-left and a reel.[2] The English collector Cecil Sharp and Maud Karpeles noted a version in Hindman, in eastern Kentucky, around 1917, and Ritchie's later version is very close to theirs.[3] The game also travelled well beyond the mountains: in 1941 a singer named Abbie Minot performed a "Going to Boston" singing game in Phippsburg, Maine, for the collector Eloise Hubbard Linscott, and the recording is listed in the Library of Congress's American Folklife Center catalog.[4]

Color lithograph bird's-eye view of Boston around 1850, looking over Boston Common toward the harbor

John Bachmann, artist; Sarony & Major, lithographers, Bird’s Eye View of Boston, color lithograph, c. 1850. Library of Congress. No known restrictions on publication. Boston as it looked in the mid-1800s; the print has no connection to the song beyond its name.

Ritchie recorded the song singing with her Appalachian dulcimer on a 1968 Folkways album of children's game songs, and her liner note encouraged children to make up their own steps to it.[1][5] She recorded it again on the 1985 Elektra album O Love Is Teasin'.[2] Fiddlers know a related instrumental, "Goodbye Girls, I'm Going to Boston," through Kentucky fiddler Art Stamper, who recorded it for County Records; his father, Hiram Stamper of Hindman, played his own, rather different version.[3] Fiddler Suzy Thompson has suggested that the tune may be related to the sea shanty "What Shall We Do with a Drunken Sailor," since their second parts are very similar, but this remains a suggestion rather than an established connection.[3] Today "Goin' to Boston" is part of the mountain dulcimer jam repertoire and appears in Stephen Seifert's Join the Jam, a collection of 75 popular jam tunes.[6]

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Sources

  1. Smithsonian Folkways: Liner notes, Jean Ritchie, Marching Across the Green Grass and Other American Children's Game Songs (FC 7702).
  2. Kodály Center American Folk Song Collection: "Goin' to Boston #1".
  3. The Traditional Tune Archive: "Annotation: Goodbye Girls I'm Going to Boston".
  4. Library of Congress, American Folklife Center: "Going to Boston (singing game)".
  5. Smithsonian Folkways: "Goin' to Boston" (Jean Ritchie).
  6. Stephen Seifert: "Join the Jam DAD Tuning".